From Tom's Games, an interview with With Doug Lombari of Valve at the GDC 08;

Considerng the successes of Valve's Sales and Distribution the big question now is;

Will Valve Add Movies, Music to Steam?

Valve's digital distribution network Steam saw record sales for the holiday season last year, which increased 158 percent from the same period in 2006. After strong showings for third party titles such as BioShock and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Valve is now looking beyond games at other digital entertainment such as video and music.

Doug Lombari, vice president of marketing at Valve, talked about Steam's evolution and growth, as well as forthcoming Valve titles and the future of PC gaming, at GDC 2008 this week.

Doug touches on two important issues, PC games are concerned with. The PC gaming industry and what is piracy doing to said industry. You may be surprised, how well Valve is doing in both.Doug Lombari: We were very happy with both the Xbox 360 and PS3 sales. I think the Xbox 360 version did just over a million, while the PS3 [released later in December] version did a few hundred thousand copies. So I think when all is said and done, The Orange Box will have sold about 1.5 million copies on the console, which is great. But the game's PC sales were much stronger.Rob Wright: How much stronger, exactly?Doug Lombari: I'd say significantly stronger, at least a two-digit percentage increase over the console sales. And that includes Steam sales, retail sales, and now individual sales of Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Half-Life 2: Episode 2. So when you take the PC numbers for The Orange Box a la carte, they're significantly higher.Rob Wright: So it wasn't such a bad year after all for PC games, despite the NPD Group numbers about declining retail sales for 2007.Doug Lombari: Well, the NPD numbers are just a snapshot. In America, there's no doubt there's a problem with PC game retail sales. But look at other countries like Germany, where sales are much stronger compared to the consoles in a lot of cases. So you have to look at the bigger picture; just look at what Blizzard did alone in 2007. And you also have to look at how money is changing hands and how games are being distributed for the PC games business. The PC is way more evolved in that respect, and digital distribution is a big part of it.Rob Wright: What about piracy? Do you think that's had a major impact on PC games sales here in the States?Doug Lombari: Well, piracy is bad, of course. But I don't think it's as big of a problem, at least for us, as people think. The majority of gamers still want to do the right thing and pay for their games. There will always be pirated games, movies and music. But the vast majority of gamers are honest and aren't going to steal the games.Rob Wright: So what's next for Valve's own games? What projects are on tap for the near future?Doug Lombari: Left 4 Dead is the big one for this year. It should be arriving sometime in the early fall, maybe September, on both the PC and the Xbox 360. The Orange Box was such a huge project for us. We acquired [Left 4 Dead developer] Turtle Rock Studios last month. In hindsight, it was probably a good thing they weren't in the same building as us, because they might have been sucked into the Orange Box, which would have pushed back Left 4 Dead. So we have some other things we're working on, too, like additional maps and other features for Team Fortress 2. We just released the Badlands map and that's been a huge hit. I personally think TF2 is the best thing Valve has ever done.